Tom shares the story behind the development of Colab, a branded platform of technology components that can be shared across the business. Treating this platform as a product helps executives and product managers, as well as developers, understand and embrace the REA technology strategy.

1. Leveraging Platforms to
Achieve Speed at Scale

5. Product development is
a team sport
We believe teams win when they have
•Proximity to their customer
•A clear mission
•Adequate resources
•Autonomy to make decisions

6. SCM
Deployment Pipelines
Infrastructure automation
Identity and Access Management
Monitoring, alerting and logging
Artefact repository
Batch computing
Auditing and compliance
Container orchestration
Deployment automation
Secrets management
Security patching
The many technical challenges of a team
Infrastructure
APIs & Data
User Experience
Usage and analytics
End-user Identity
Experiment infrastructure
User analytics
Client-side monitoring
Style guides
Page construction
Personalisation
Content distribution
Service discovery
Load balancing and throttling
API authentication and authorisation
API documentation
Monitoring of services
Data discovery
Data orchestration
Data governance
Self-service reporting
Data publication

7. Customer

8. Customer

9. Customer

10. Customer

11. Factoring out commonality
Commonality
APIs and Data
User Experience
Infrastructure

12. Central Infrastructure Team
Customer

13. REA in 2017

14. Growing sense of frustration
Product:
“Why does it take so long to
get a product out?”
Engineers:
“I’m spending a lot of time doing the
same things over and over again”
CFO:
“How do we manage our cost
growth?”
CEO:
“How do we improve productivity?”

15. Platform maturity vs investment levels
Infrastructure
APIs & Data
User Experience
26%
8%
Investment %Platform Maturity
66%

16. Why is re-use so hard?
• Projects and platforms at the same
time is an illusion - incentive mismatch
• Team autonomy optimises
for project delivery and not global
efficiency
• Hard to account for dispersed costs of
low re-use
• Picking right things to re-use
& and timing is hard

17. Adoption of Shipper — an internal deployment tool
0
600
2015 2016 2017

18. ✓ Solves a real, constant problem that almost
all teams have
✓ Strong vision for what the tool should do
(and not do)
✓ Ongoing investment
✓ Great user support
✓ Good documentation
✓ Classroom style of training
✓ Easy upgrade path
✓ Open to feedback and contributions
from users
What made it a success?
Product Management!

19. Tip 1
Apply product thinking to
your internal platform

20. “Platform”

21. Colab brand
DX - Developer
Experience
Delivery
Tools
Data
End-user tech
APIs

22. A Colab product has
A Product Manager who defines:
Roadmaps, audiences, metrics,
business cases, adoption strategies
and comms plans.
Well-defined clients
Relevancy
Marketing Plan
AT T R I B U T E S O F A C O L A B P R O D U C T
Support
Great Doco
Success Metrics
High Quality
A Custodian who keeps quality by:
Trimming the backlog, advancing tech, providing
support for users, maintaining documentation
and upholding SLAs.
A Destination where teams can:
Search and read documentation, make
contributions, see examples, learn, request
features, provide feedback and contribute back.

23. Colab Manifesto
Serving others over protecting oneself
Aligned autonomy over unconstrained autonomy
Long-term thinking over short-term gains
REA benefit over team benefit
Products as assets over projects as assets

24. Tip 2
Use brand and icons to
tell the platform story

25. Previous platform effort
in hindsight
• Building for future needs, not current
problems
• Timing mismatch between today’s needs
and time required to build future proof
solution
• No platform vision, principles or culture
change to go with the capabilities

26. Colab product lifecycle*
*Lean Enterprise - Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly & Joanne Molesky
EXPLORE EXPLOIT SUSTAIN
Test usefulness of
platform concept
Harvest platform
capabilities and scale
Evolution of established
LIFECYCLE
STAGE
RETIRE
Decommission
capabilities that are
no longer valuable
Centralise ownership and
drive adoption /
convergence
Maintain relevance and
usefulnessAPPROACH
Encourage divergence to
test multiple options
Set sunset date and help
customers migrate
REQUIREMENT • Clear ownership
• Resource allocation
• Product management
• Documentation
• Advocacy
• Training
• Consulting services
• Capacity in team with
need to experiment
• Forums to share
lessons laterally
• Clear ownership
• Small amount of
capacity for BAU
• Supported upgrade
paths
• Health monitoring
• Clear migration method
• Consulting services to
help migrate
• Resource allocation to
retire and clean up

27. Pave the path*
• Find common problems that many
teams are solving
• Harvest the best solutions and create
platform products
• Make it easy to do the right thing by
providing a great product and customer
experience
*See Neflix Literature

28. Tip 3
Harvest the platform
and pave the path

29. Autonomy vs leverage?
AutonomyLeverage
Move towards leverage as
the organisation grows

30. Product vs platform teams
• Primary goal is to drive leverage.
• Product Teams are the customer.
• Builds and maintains things that many Product
Teams rely on.
• Takes a long term, strategic, sustainable view.
• Owns mostly core systems.
• Slower rate of change, somewhat shielded
from short term commercial pressures.
Platform
Team
Product
Team
• Primary goal is to serve the market.
• Own the products that customers interact with.
• Takes a long term, sustainable view for some
products and a speculative/experimental view for
others.
• Own mostly “leaf” systems.
• Faster rate of change to meet market pressures.
Both have
autonomy to make
decisions in the
interest of their
customers

31. Customer
Product
Teams
Platform
Teams

32. Use customer KPIs to measure success
Customer
Primary
Drivers
Success
Metrics
External Revenue
Internal Leverage
Adoption
• Number of customers, consumption by
customer, consumption by product
Service
• Number of issues raised, time to respond,
time to close
Customer Satisfaction
• NPS, survey feedback
Performance
• Uptime, throughput, response time
Delivery Efficiency
• Velocity, cycle time, roadmap delivery
Product
Team
Platform
Team

33. People & skills
New roles
• Technical Product Manager
• Technical Writer
• Developer Advocate
• Trainer
New Skills
• Product Management
• Stakeholder management and influencing
• Customer research

34. Tip 4
Organise for autonomy
AND leverage

35. REA Tech Building Blocks

36. Tomas Varsavsky, Chief Engineer
Twitter @tvars
Tech blog https://rea.tech